{"id":24967,"date":"2015-03-30T09:02:07","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T15:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/?p=24967"},"modified":"2015-04-01T06:40:21","modified_gmt":"2015-04-01T12:40:21","slug":"troll-linda-ellis-felled-by-ga-supreme-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/2015\/troll-linda-ellis-felled-by-ga-supreme-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Troll Linda Ellis Felled by GA Supreme Court"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday March 27, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in favor of Matt Chan in his appeal of a lower court ruling finding ‘stalking’. My interpretation of the ruling<\/a>— which I’ve read using my non-lawyer eyes– is the Court not only granted Chan’s appeal but<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. They ruled in his favor 7-0. This was not a close call at all. Every single judge ruled for Chan.<\/li>\n
  2. This was not a “first amendment beats stalking” case: Every single member of the court ruled Chan did not contact Ellis. Stalking through contact was the only mechanism of stalking even claimed<\/em> in the lower court ruling against Chan. When overruling the lone (in my view demented) Judge Jordan, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned the conviction because– basically– the Ellis side did not provide evidence that indicated Chan stalked Ellis. American’s all understand that courts never actually clear<\/I>anyone of a crime; courts always leave open the possibility that some evidence not presented to them exists somewhere. So one can’t go so far as to say the justices fully, 100% decreed Chan did not stalk. However, effectively<\/i> they overturned his conviction ruling he did not stalk Ellis– or at least Judge Jordan’s ruling was not supported by the evidence presented to him in court. <\/li>\n
  3. \"Sexally<\/a>The ruling was not based on a cursory exposure to the evidence presented in the lower court. I write this because Linda Ellis is suggesting that the difference in lower court ruling is the one based on ‘facts’ (and so implying the other is not.) At least that’s the argument I infer when Linda Ellis writes
    \n

    what it clarifies is that people tend to form an opinion without receiving all the facts. The initial judge had the facts…he received them in an all day hearing. Those that are not presented here for you. That’s why he (the judge) issued a permanent restraining order in the first place. \ud83d\ude09<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    In fact, the seven justice of the Georgia Supreme court ruled after viewing copious<\/i> amounts of evidence and reading arguments and counter arguments of legal representatives from both sides. Matt Chan had had the presence of mind to enter much of the forum content into the evidence when presenting to the lower court– thereby giving the justices access to that evidence. Moreover, the evidence included<\/i> portions highlighted<\/I> by representatives for Ellis’s side. Among these were examples of posts Ellis had used to convince the lower court that the ELI forum contained death threats and sexually explicit material. The image to the right is one Ellis’s lawyers highlighted– presumably because they consider that image some of the strongest<\/i> evidence of “death threat”, and “sexually explicit”. (Other examples included someone linking to a youtube video of someone signing the child’s song “the worms crawl in the worm’s crawl out”– a song I have known since I was less than 7 years old and which we giggled to while singing at day camp.) <\/li>\n

  4. This is not a “Federal law idemnifies forum owner who let his visitors stalk” ruling. While the Ellis side presented quite a bit of content written by visitors to Chan’s forum and complained that content not written by Chan<\/em> demonstrated Chan was stalking, the Supreme courts argument that content– posted by third parites– would not be ruled stalking even if the content creators themselves were being accused of stalking. Chan didn’t need federal indemnity for permitting them to post that material because that material did not represent “contact” either.<\/li>\n
  5. The ruling was not a technicality based on any sort of “cyber” element excluding “cyber” stalking form “stalking” . The court recognized that “contact” can occur on electronic media writing
    \n

    For purposes of the statute, one \u00e2\u20ac\u0153contacts another person \u00e2\u20ac\u009dwhen he\u00e2\u20ac\u0153 communicates with another person\u00e2\u20ac\u009d through any medium, including an electronic medium <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    So it’s rather clear the justices would consider ‘cyber contact’ to be a form of ‘contact’. However, non<\/em>-contact remains non<\/em>-contact whether the ‘non<\/em>-contact’ occurs when someone talks to a third party while sitting on a bus, writes an article in a dead-tree newspaper or posts a comment on an electric forum. These discussion are not magically vaulted into the domain of “contact” merely because they occurred in cyber-space rather than meat space.<\/li>\n

  6. The ruling was also not based on any sort of “technicality” related to Linda visiting the ELI form. I mention this because Linda Ellis is claiming so writing
    \n

    I had already been granted permanent protection from this guy and then it was taken away on a technicality<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    in comments at a newspaper online forum<\/a>.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In brief: The court ruled in Chan’s favor because the evidence presented by Ellis’s side did not support the claim Chan was guilty of stalking Ellis by “contacting” her. The lower court didn’t find him guilty of stalking her in any other<\/I> ways possible under the Georgia statute– presumably because the lower court didn’t find evidence to support a guilty charge under other branches of the statutes. So: the lower courts ruling was overturned for lack of evidence of any “stalking”. The ruling was not close; it was not a technicality. The stalking ruling was overturned because Judge Jordan’s ruling was not supported by the evidence presented in court.<\/p>\n

    My hope<\/b>. As some know, a huge amount of information discussing Linda Ellis’s distasteful money grasping business practices used to appear at Matt Chan’s ELI<\/a> and was taken down as a result of Judge Jordan’s legally unsupportable ruling and ridiculous PPO preventing Matt from running a forum that discussed Linda Ellis in any way, shape or form. The duration of the PPO? Forever. <\/p>\n

    I hope the Ellis forum will re-appear shortly at ELI. I have two reasons for this wish: <\/p>\n

    First, re-publication will permit interested readers to view the posts Ellis and her legal representatives claimed demonstrate ‘stalking’, are ‘sexually explicit’ or amount to “death threats”. Full republication would permit the posts to be read in context. While many people might consider cartoon images of people with pants pulled won juvenile, crude or ineffective tactics, these sort of things are not “death threats”. Posting that sort in public for the amusement of third parties is not “stalking”. The lower court ruling against Chan was rightfully over turned. I applaud it and I’d like interested parties to see the forum to learn just how ridiculous the ruling was. <\/p>\n

    Second if the former forum content is re-posted, it will permit people to learn more about Ellis’s business practices some of which I highlighted here: Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Post Linda Ellis\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Dash\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/a> While Linda Ellis may believe she is entirely justified in sending out heavy handed, scary letters demanding exorbitant amounts of money from those who posted her poem in extremely lightly trafficked back-waters of the web, I think she her behavior is outrageous. I think she should be publicly shamed. But if I am wrong and she is correct, she shouldn’t mind people discussing her business model in public. So the public discussion shouldn’t bother her one iota. Her behavior which involves filing restraining orders and DMCA takedowns which would have the effect of removing all<\/I> discussion of her business practice suggests she would prefer people remain unaware that the sois-dissant life-affirming poetess cares more about extracting cash from those who post the dash than she cares about living a full-graceful life that exhibits care and kindness toward others. This suggests she is a hypocrite.<\/p>\n

    But my concern is not that she is a hypocrite. My concern is that scrubbing the internet of information about her business practices puts naive people who might publish her poem — possible in honor of the death of a loved one– at risk of receiving frightening letters demanding amounts of money they can ill afford to pay. Publicizing her practice might prevent some from posting the stupid poem and with luck will allow the trite thing to fall into obscurity where it rightfully belongs.<\/p>\n

    With that, I close my sermon. I invite those who wish to discuss copyright extortion, restraining order abuse, abuse of DMCA or any topic associated with the Chan and Ellis ruling to comment. <\/p>\n

    Update: I’m going to post links to other sites discussing this case which are appearing.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Oscar Michelin<\/a> posted a nice history of his involvement.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Other updates:
      \nLinda appears to now be inviting comments at her facebook.       This one<\/a> looks at least as much of a “death threat” as the cartoon of people with their pants pulled down.
      \n It’s been up 15 hours. Linda has posted within 9 hours. If she really thinks this sort of thing is a death threat, stalking and so on, and that a visitor to her facebook page thinks the other person writing it constitutes her writing it or her stalking, you’d think she’d take it down. Nope. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      On Friday March 27, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in favor of Matt Chan in his appeal of a lower court ruling finding ‘stalking’. My interpretation of the ruling— which I’ve read using my non-lawyer eyes– is the Court not only granted Chan’s appeal but They ruled in his favor 7-0. This was not a … Continue reading Troll Linda Ellis Felled by GA Supreme Court<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[428,134],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright-2","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24967"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26877,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24967\/revisions\/26877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}